Miss Snuffleupagus finds herself in India with her fellow inner-city London school teachers, where she compares irresponsible Indian youths to those back home and asks of the London kids, Are we to blame?
The man who is hosting us for the morning in his business offices is a great success: rich, powerful and philanthropic. But he thinks that young people no longer have values. His experience of hiring youngsters just out of university has shown him this. They think of themselves as individuals, not part of a community. They have lost their sense of religion, of making their parents proud, of wanting to do something well for the sake of simply doing it well.
I look around the room. My colleagues are all nodding vigorously.
‘Wow! We have the same issues in England!’
‘Yes! Isn’t it incredible? We fly thousands of miles and we find that children are the same all over the world!’
‘Children in both the West and the East have the wrong attitudes! That’s why we need to stop teaching them subjects and start teaching them how to learn!’
Everyone is smiling, congratulating each other with their eyes. One teacher yelps with delight.
‘Imagine! All this time I had the impression that Indian children were interested in education, when actually they aren’t any different from anyone else!’
Everyone nods in her direction, including all the Indians in the room. I, of course, just look at the ground. All I’m thinking is, something doesn’t quite fit here. I mean, I know what Indian kids are like in England. And so do all my fellow teachers, but somehow for the simplicity of today’s argument, they’ve conveniently forgotten what they know to be FACT. And then I also know, as do all my colleagues, that all of the Indians we’ve met over the last few days, in shops, at organized events, in schools, have been remarkably polite and well-brought up. What this man is saying, simply doesn’t make sense.
So later on, I catch him on his own, determined to find the missing card.
‘What you said about young people in India today was really interesting.’ I giggle. ‘You know sir, I love to hear the horror stories. Of all the ‘bad’ things you’ve seen some of your young new employees do, I would love for you to tell me one of the worst.’
This man is in his late forties. His face is weathered and his funny mustache looks as if someone had painted on his lip. His eyes open wide at my suggestion and he winces as he leans in to whisper the terrible atrocity.
‘Well, you see, once I hired this young man, and he came to his first day of work, and well, he was wearing this pair of trousers which had several pockets on the outside!’
I pull back. ‘Several pockets?’
‘Yes! At least sixteen of them!’
I laugh. He laughs too. ‘Yes! Can you imagine! So I shouted at him and told him to go home and get changed!’
I smile. So there you have it: there’s the missing card. What this man means by ‘having no values’ is something entirely different to what we mean when we say our kids have lost their way. As this man and I laugh together at his experience with this young man, I think about our three boys at school who currently wear ankle tags, put there by the police to keep them in check because they violently attacked a man on the street without any provocation whatsoever.
GBH vs trousers with lots of pockets: yeah, I can see how they’re similar. I can see how my fellow teachers might easily have misunderstood this situation. And you know what’s funny? Not only do my colleagues now believe that Indian children are really badly behaved, but these Indians now think that our children are the same as theirs!
But I cannot blame the Indians. How would they know differently? But my colleagues… not only SHOULD they know better, they DO know better. But for some reason, they’d rather come to conclusions which are patently false. And then I have to ask myself… whose fault is this? Is the government always to blame? Is the government in the room with us now? Is the government making us forcibly blind? Have they removed our powers of analysis? Or are our accusers right? Are we teachers to blame after all?
“That’s why we need to stop teaching them subjects and start teaching them how to learn!”
Which sounds like a recipe for turning every field of knowledge into “social studies” mush.
Very depressing that this sort of mindlessness is also affecting (infecting) teachers in India.